44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 5, 2022 02:00PM
- Oct/5/22 3:11:16 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, yesterday we observed the day of action to raise awareness of the national crisis regarding missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQI+ people.
Reports show that they are more likely to experience violence than any other Canadian. At yesterday's gathering on Parliament Hill, families and survivors called on our government to support their healing and justice initiatives.
Could the hon. Prime Minister update us on what is being done to end this crisis?
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- Oct/5/22 4:25:55 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I have given notice, under Standing Order 52(2), seeking leave today, Wednesday, October 5, to request an emergency debate on the mental health and substance use crisis in Canada.
Yesterday, the Mental Health Commission of Canada and the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction released a joint report on the continuing impacts of the COVID–19 pandemic on the mental health of Canadians, which detailed some alarming findings.
According to polling conducted for the report, 35% of respondents reported moderate to severe mental health concerns. It also found that fewer than one in three people with current mental health concerns and fewer than one in four with problematic substance use are accessing services. The report identified the key barriers to accessing services: financial constraints, not having readily available help, not knowing how and where to get help, and long wait lists.
The report identified financial concerns as a top stressor during the pandemic and discussed the links of income and unemployment with mental health concerns. With the rapidly rising cost of living and speculation of an impending recession, there is a real risk that the mental health and substance use crisis will worsen in the months ahead.
We also know that medical professionals have been raising the alarm for months that our health care system is on the brink of collapse. As we head into colder months, when the burden on hospitals and health care workers is expected to increase, a worsening mental health and substance use crisis will only push our health care system closer to the edge.
The mental health crisis has been referred to as a “parallel pandemic”, but Parliament has not had a debate on how to respond. As such, I believe an urgent debate by parliamentarians is warranted on the steps that should be taken to support the mental health of Canadians and reduce the social and economic impacts of this crisis.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to mention that I will be sharing my time with my esteemed and talented colleague from Beauport—Côte-de-Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—Charlevoix.
We have been living through unprecedented times for a little over two years now. Certainly, this is not the first pandemic. The last one was a hundred years ago. Of course, this is not the first war humans have experienced. Moreover, this is not the first inflationary crisis we have lived through. However, it is the first time that those three elements have overlapped, and during the communication age no less.
The pandemic seems to have been the catalyst that exposed global weaknesses in the supply chain, dependence on foreign production and flaws in long-term political vision. This was compounded by the war in Ukraine, yet that is not the only war being fought. There are other wars in other countries, in different forms, with serious repercussions for the people. However, the war in Ukraine is putting additional pressure on supply chains, especially agricultural and food supply chains. That pressure is aggravating situations that were already tragic in a number of countries, such as those in Africa.
In Canada, that pressure is felt in the form of higher prices, such as input prices for farmers and consumer prices for ordinary Canadians. I could cite a long list of elements that led to the current inflationary crisis, given that inflation is a fairly complex phenomenon that is never caused by only one or two factors.
Just the same, before I begin, I would like to highlight one other factor that increases the pressure on Canadian households. The rise in the cost of housing, whether one is purchasing or renting, is not inconsequential. It is the result of an increase in population, both in Quebec and in Canada, and of a decrease in the amount of social and affordable housing being built. I am talking about housing such as co-operatives, low-income housing and other models that can be found in Quebec, in particular.
Social housing allows low-income people to spend less than 30% of their income on housing, while still living in an environment where they can receive services and support, and where they can participate in a rewarding community life.
To recap, I would say that the current inflationary situation has a direct link to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. As such, it is important to implement solutions with a positive long-term vision. We need solutions that are sustainable and predictable, but also flexible.
We must not forget that the current situation is having repercussions now and that it will continue for a long time if nothing is done. It will have repercussions on the health care system, on the workplace and in community settings.
While we all aspire to reach the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in other words, meeting our need for accomplishment through self-actualization, by achieving our full potential and our creativity, the current situation directly attacks the first two steps of the pyramid that are physiological needs, or basic needs, and the need for security.
A society has everything to gain by ensuring that the majority of its population reaches the last steps of Maslow's pyramid, the need for esteem and the need for accomplishment. I say the majority because in a person's life there is always a moment or a situation that brings them back to the physiological needs, the need for affection and the need for security.
However, in a strong society, that person can overcome adversity to reach the upper levels, esteem and self-actualization, again. Society has everything to gain, because people who meet their need for esteem and self-actualization tend to be engaged in all the spheres of their lives, professional, social and family. They are happier and healthier, and they take better care of themselves and their loved ones. That directly relieves some of the strain on the health care system and positively impacts workplaces and, by extension, GDP and productivity.
In addition, if we spend less on health care, we can spend more on the second-biggest item in any government's budget: education. A population that achieves esteem and self-actualization is a population that strongly values all forms of education and invests in its education system to enable future generations to achieve esteem and self-actualization too.
The pandemic first attacked the middle part of the hierarchy, in other words, love and belonging. Think of the children and seniors who felt lonely and isolated. Think of the adults who get their sense of self from their jobs or their sporting activities, but they too found themselves stuck at home alone.
After that, the pandemic and inflation combined to attack people's safety needs and essential needs. Here are the repercussions of that: People are exhausted and stressed by the fear of not being able to make ends meet; children are just as anxious because they sense their parents' stress better than anyone else, even though kids try to hide their stress and its causes from their parents. Parents usually try to preserve their kids' innocence and the beauty and generosity of childhood.
The current solution of increasing the GST credit alleviates the stress of people who face the prospect of not being able to meet their basic needs. The fact remains that it is a temporary measure, yet it can do some good, especially as people must purchase necessities for the approaching winter season. However, the current situation will have short-, medium- and long-term impacts. We must have a medium- to long-term vision when implementing solutions. If not, there will be dramatic repercussions for the health and education systems, work environments, communities and community organizations. We cannot let people become overwhelmed by the stress of seeking the means to meet basic needs and the need for safety.
I will come back once again to Maslow's hierarchy. To make it possible for people to reach the higher levels of the pyramid by meeting their physiological needs, safety needs, need for love and belonging, we must have a holistic vision and work on the root causes of the problems in order to find lasting solutions. I would like to humbly and simply list some potential solutions. Unfortunately, I do so without explaining them, but we could talk about this further. I simply want to provide some food for thought.
Since 2016, 100,000 social housing units should have been built every year, but they were not. We need to increase funding so we can make up for some of that delay, which has a direct impact on the current price of housing. Then, we must maintain the funding so that such “gaps” in construction never happen again.
Quebec and Canada are welcoming places. Newcomers must have access to adequate housing, without forcing us to neglect the desperate needs of First Nations or of other segments of the population who have been in Canada for years or even decades.
I remind members that social housing offers rent that represents less than 30% of the tenants' income. It is not 10% off the price of a $2,500 a month apartment rental. For this type of housing, it makes more sense for projects to be overseen by community organizations whose mission is to provide relief to people, instead of by companies whose mission is only to make a profit.
As we have been saying for a long time, inflation has a direct impact on people with fixed incomes. There are those over the age of 75, but there are also those aged 65 to 74, and we must enable them to catch up with inflation and access a tax credit that would allow them, if they so wish, to go back to work and earn a little more, without having their guaranteed income supplement or pension clawed back.
We must also think about developing our regions. Canada is full of beautiful regions to discover, and we must develop them. To do this, we need better means of transportation. It would be wonderful if we had a railway system worthy of the 21st century, not the 19th century. We need companies that will settle in our regions and young people who want to follow them to take advantage of tax credits for new graduates who go work in the regions. I would also like to see an energy transition that allows people to have electricity and heating without falling prey to speculation.
In short, the GST payment is a good thing at this point in time. However, as elected officials, we have a duty to protect the dignity of the less fortunate. It is both possible and necessary to do so in the long term. As elected officials, we must stop thinking only in terms of polls, the next election or the issues of the day.
We need to think in terms of the next 10 to 50 years.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a privilege for me to be able to stand tonight and speak to this bill. I am going to speak slowly, because I just decided to do this and do not have anything to provide to the translators, so I promised them I would do my best to make it as easy as possible for them to translate what I have to say tonight.
It is really important we go back to the beginning of the current government, which was my first time in the House, and remember what happened as early as preCOVID. We tend to focus on things as they are right now, but how did we get here? We have heard over and over again tonight the word “crisis” and that we are in a crisis. Absolutely, I agree, but why are we in the crisis we are in today, where Canadians are suffering so much within an economy that is simply not functioning the way it should?
We heard about sunny ways and how amazing life was going to be for Canadians with a new government. Honestly, it is true, there was a real sense of hope in Canada when the Liberal government came to power. However, seven years later, we are in a situation where the government, when it runs out of answers, goes all the way back to 2017 to talk about the amazing things it did.
It brought in a Canada child benefit, which, it claims, lifted all of these children out of poverty and no longer gave money to the wealthy, and which was just an amazing service that it gave to Canadians.
However, what the government does not talk about is how many of those whom they raised out of poverty were also being raised out of poverty previously, and also that the way it runs this program, where it picks winners and losers, costs a lot more. The way the government functions, bureaucratically, costs Canadians more.
As I walked along, knocking on doors, people would say to me that they get the child benefit but have to give it all back. At that point, I would ask if they owned their home, how many cars they had and if they both worked. In that circumstance, they did not need that money. I would tell them to set it aside, and when the time came, to pay it back to the government through their taxes.
However, what if something happened whereby that family lost its means of income in the course of that year? Let us say they worked in the oil field when the government came into power, and all of a sudden their jobs are gone. The way this program is set up, they would need to wait until the next year, after they filed their taxes, to show how desperate they were, and then have their child benefit reinstated. The way the program used to run, if someone hit the end of that year and things were bad, they would have that money.
On the circumstances around lowering the taxes on the middle class and raising them on the wealthy, there are reasons to go that route to some degree, yet the government claimed it was revenue neutral. We know it was not. We are talking millions of dollars in difference that it did not make up by doing that, so already we were in a situation where the government was not managing money well. It was not managing the funds from Canadians' money well in the way it was providing its programs.
That was all preCOVID, when it signalled to the world that Canada was not going to be open for business anymore. All kinds of small businesses and medium-sized businesses that were involved in our oil and gas industry left this country in an instant. I am sure the members on the other side of the floor must understand that when one does that and all of a sudden creates chaos in the source of funding for our economy, it is not a good thing. Canadians were left in very dire straights.
We were no longer open for business. We lost the confidence of investors in this nation. As a matter of fact, the government had to buy a pipeline, or maybe chose to buy a pipeline, because it wanted to control the future of our oil and gas industry in a way that was not beneficial toward a green economy in the future, because we were hampering our own country at a time when the world, and it knows this as well, will continue to need oil for a long time.
Therefore, we are saying to a world that needs our products that are clean and ethical and enable our people to earn a living and to pay taxes so that the current and future governments can provide for the true needs of Canadians, that all of a sudden it is not there. These measures that we are looking at today are temporary measures. They are like putting one's finger in a dike.
I know Canadians are desperate enough to say that they want this and need this and that it is better than nothing, but the frustrating thing is that we never should have gotten here in the first place. The government promised a $10-billion over-expenditure on an annual basis. It has never met that promise, and we are facing almost a trillion and a half dollars in debt as a nation, larger than all the debt combined throughout the history of our country. That is where we are today.
Of course, Canadians are in a circumstance that is very difficult. I grew up in Saskatchewan. As I was growing up, we had an NDP government. I grew up during that time when things were really tough. My husband has four siblings and I have five. Out of 11 of us, everybody but two left our province. There was no work. There was no income for our government to do the things it needed to do. We were in a situation where government knew best and wanted to provide for everybody, and it shut down productivity in our province. People left because there was no work. There was no encouragement for people to become small business men or women and make a difference for their own family by becoming productive on their own.
With respect to these measures that I am seeing here now, they are trying to put a stopgap in a situation that is really bad. That is what happened during COVID as well, because people were not allowed to work. Small business owners in my communities could have maintained their ability to be active in their communities. They could have continued to pay their employees and produce their products in a way that worked within that environment, but the government shut everything down. Yes, it provided in that circumstance, but it created the problem as well.
I experienced having a small business in the early 1980s. It says here that this is the worst inflation in 40 years. Do members know what was happening about 40 years ago? I experienced losing our business, as did many business owners, because interest rates rose to 22% overnight because of the fiscal approach of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Here we are today. The apple does not fall far from the tree.
I just want to put a shout-out for the fact that yes, as the NDP members are saying, large corporations should not be receiving benefits from the government. The Liberal government handed out incredible money for fridges for a large corporation that these people spoke against, yet here it is now, supporting them.
I want to speak for corporations that put incredible amounts of tax dollars into our provincial and federal governments and provide amazing community resources. I know, because I live where there is one. They provide benefits to their employees that are unmatched. We have a lot for which to thank those corporations that do good work and are fiscally and environmentally responsible. We should not be painting them all with the same brush.
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